The Wolfpack Is the Most Fascinating Documentary at Sundance So Far

Sundance festivalgoers packed Park City’s Temple Theater on Sunday night for the highly anticipated premiere of **Crystal Moselle’**s documentary, The Wolfpack, which puts a decidedly new spin on an age-old question: What exactly is going on in the apartment next door?

For the neighbors of the Angulo family, the answer was this: seven children squeezed into a Lower East Side tenement, where they were raised by their father, an anticapitalist recluse named Oscar, on Hare Krishna, heavy metal, and his collection of more than 5,000 films. The brood was almost never allowed outside.

In 2010, four months after first approaching the Angulo boys during one of their rare outdoor excursions, Moselle was invited to capture their world. The alienated and imaginative children constructed elaborate reenactments of their favorite flicks (Pulp Fiction, JFK, Braveheart) between home-schooling lessons from their mother, Susanne, and tense exchanges with Oscar, who felt he was protecting the family from the dangers of the city. (As one of the sons sorrowfully recounts on camera, there was a full year when the kids never once left the apartment.)

Filming the boys almost exclusively within the confines of what is both their prison and their refuge, Moselle presents a narrative that deftly avoids judgment and analysis. Her own footage, which spans five years, is supplemented by extensive home videos recorded by the family, which lends the story both a discomfiting intimacy and a cool objectivity, à la Capturing the Friedmans. Wisely, Moselle encourages the boys to speak for themselves—they come off as intelligent, kind, and thoughtful, if a bit awkward—and to maintain ownership of their story. Even Oscar is given time to talk, appearing onscreen either in bed (staring at two TVs set up in front of him) or calmly rationalizing his eccentric parenting approach.

Though Moselle allows viewers to draw their own conclusions, she also misses an opportunity to pose deeper questions about the society the Angulos have opted out of—to present the larger, more universal themes that connect this peculiar, ingenious tribe to the rest of us. Still, the effects of Moselle’s presence are clear: The boys had already begun to rebel by the time filming started, but it’s apparent that their relationship with an outsider accelerated their insurgence.​Little by little, we see them—feral, pale, shy—step out from under their father, and toward the mainstream. Their waist-length hair is shorn; they pursue individual interests, such as environmental activism and hip-hop; they spend an afternoon at the beach. (The point was especially underscored when the brothers appeared in person before the Sundance audience, in matching Reservoir Dogs–like black suits and sunglasses.) Most conventional of all, perhaps, they discover girls. When a blonde actress named Chloe is cast in a film by one of the sons, Mukunda, an aspiring director and perhaps the most bold of the pack, we’re reminded that, no matter how unusual their circumstances, boys will be boys.